The UK Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee defines identity fraud as “when a false identity or someone else's identity details are used to support unlawful activity, or when someone avoids obligation/liability by falsely claiming that he/she was the victim of identity fraud” (National Fraud Authority, Fraud Typologies and Victims of Fraud—Literature Review 2009). Identity crimes are one of the fastest growing types of fraud in the UK. The UK's Fraud prevention service found that identity fraud accounted for roughly 50% of all frauds recorded in 2012; and that there had been a 9 percent increase in identity frauds, compared with 2011 (CIFAS 2012 Fraud Trends, 17 Jan. 2013). In December 2012 the National Fraud Authority suggested that identity fraud cost UK adults approximately £3.3 billion each year (National Fraud Authority, Annual Fraud Indicator 2013). However, this does not include any losses suffered by the public, private or charity sectors. Therefore, the full cost to the UK from identity fraud each year is likely to be considerably higher. Similarly, a National Crime Victimization Survey conducted in the US found that individual financial losses due to personal identity theft totaled $24.7 billion, over $10 billion more than the losses attributed to all other property crimes measured in the survey (Victims of Identity Theft 2012).
Automated systems for identity verification and matching are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 8,322,605 describes an identity matching system which enables an operator to determine the status of an individual based on identification information contained on an identification records provided by the individual and environmental information such as threat levels issued by the military or the Department of Homeland Security. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 7,110,573 describes an apparatus for automatically identifying and validating identity documents, for validating the identity of the bearer of the document; and verifying that the bearer has authorization to participate in an activity represented by the document. These prior art systems are limited insofar as they perform identity validation based on features contained in presented identity documents only. However, these documents and associated features can be readily altered or forged by fraudsters.
On detection of a fraudulent, counterfeit, forged or fraudulently obtained document (henceforth known, for brevity, as illegitimate documents), users of authentication software and/or policing or other authorities confiscate images of the illegitimate identity documents. Similarly, investigations and searches of identity farms reveal faces about to be used to create new identities for the subsequent commission of identity fraud. IDscan Biometrics Limited (trade mark) has harvested the faces from images of illegitimate identity documents detected in routine (or otherwise) identity authentication processes, records of faces about to be used in identity farms and detected in the course of other intelligence operations, to create a sizable proprietary archive uniquely comprising of faces of persons specifically linked with a previous fraudulent activity; or intended to be and about to be used in the commissioning of a fraudulent activity.